A review by jakepcole
From Hell by Eddie Campbell, Alan Moore

5.0

Moore's great achievement isn't so much to elevate the comic book as a medium but to explore the possibilities of the format as literature. This is the best thing of his I've yet read, including Watchmen, a work of modernism that references and is shaped by a multimedia trove of touchstones ranging from William Blake to penny dreadfuls, all in service of exploring the role of tabloid frenzy and imperial machinations (the two inseparable even today) in the birth of the 20th century. Moore traverses ecstatic visions of Masonic influence in high-minded riffs that are brutally grounded by Campbell's ink-splash style, which blends hurried sketch, negative space and, finally, an ink-blot middle ground between Romanticism and abstract expressionism.